I have worked for my entire career in public tax-assisted institutions. State support to institutions continue to decline each year and the importance of tuition and other auxiliary revenues continues to rise. There is never enough money, but managing what one has to maximize the return on investment toward the institutional mission and vision is among the most important issues provosts face.
As my administration career has progressed, I have been entrusted with greater resource management responsibility. To me, resources in higher education are people, time, and toys. Learning how to manage these effectively is the daily challenge for any academic administrator. For provosts, the scale combined with declining state support is the challenge. Seeing the inter-relationships among people, time, and toys across units is the critical skill to develop and master.
As Dean of the Graduate School, I managed approximately $1.5 million in resources in the Division of Academic Affairs of which approximately $150,000 is discretionary. The majority of these resources were graduate teaching assistantships awarded through the Graduate School. Here is an example of the graduate assistantship allocations process model I designed. I have examples of people who report directly or indirectly to me, examples of people’s time, where a faculty member has reassignment to lead an important initiative under my direction, and examples of toys in the form of scholarships, equipment, technology systems, and operational expense budgets.
As a department chair, I managed a large department of 16.1 FTE with annual resource costs of approximately $1 million and an additional Foundation scholarship endowment valued around $1.2 million. As a music department, there was a significant inventory of toys in the form of musical instruments and specialized instructional space I was responsible for maintaining for the institution.
At the division level, budget development and allocation must be driven by process informed by the strategic plan and important data pieces about the institution (e.g. ratios of tenure-track, NTT, and adjunct faculty and threshold metrics for internal targets for adding resources). Additionally, the decision should be driven by the “mission critical” factor of the unit under consideration as there are always examples of mission critical units that will never attain thresholds “market smart” units will (e.g. arts and humanities units). Differential thresholds should be used in determining resource allocation for these units. Group-based decision making should be employed throughout the institution in this process in order to attain the highest degree of acceptance from all stakeholders in the organization. Finally, communication should occur to ensure transparency of the process to all stakeholders. Here is a basic budget development process model I have visualized for implementation in the role of provost/VPAA.
Timothy R Crowley 